Learning to Write

Time for business. I've been down for the count the past week, but I am back and ready to write, at least I hope. It has been very discouraging to not see your lovely faces and hear all the wonderful stories you have to share. Also, the couch isn't the most inspiring place to work. Now that I have my fix of Disney, HGTV, and TLC, I've got work to do. As suggested in chapter 4, I am pre-writing. I don't really have an aim or theme to this. I have an idea. I will tell you the story of how I learned to write.

I credit my early writing skills to my fourth grade teacher, Mrs. Byrnes, and my dad. In elementary school, I was pretty good at the English/writing things we did in class. Remember DOL, bare books, and spelling tests? Language came naturally to me. At one point during the year Mrs. Byrnes decided to have a writing assignment every week. Yes, one paper per week. They were only one page little blurbs, but I thought she was crazy. Nevertheless, I plugged away. I wrote about a tea kettle, my favorite kind of apple, and a killer personal narrative that was very traumatic for a fourth grader. At every step of the way my dad was there to encourage and teach me. I learned about sentence structure, "be" verbs, organization, flow, word choice, and more. I wasn't very good at any of it yet, but it laid the foundation that got me where I am today. Mrs. Byrnes knew what she was doing. The only way to get better at writing is to practice.

p.s. How do you write about the time in your life where you were just plain stupid? Kind of goes against nature here...